It would appear that Anycubic’s short-lived 4Max Pro is getting a new lease of life as the Anycubic 4Max Metal, a desktop metal 3D printer tuned to print the company’s also-new 316L stainless steel filament.
That’s right. Real metal 3D printing from the company that brought you the Photon, and i3 Mega.
It goes without saying that there’s a lot to unpack about this particular printer, besides that it signifies Anycubic’s growing ambition and enthusiasm (for better or worse) to cater to all and try new things.
Features
Pushed as a desktop 3D printer specializing in the printing of metal materials, Anycubic’s 4Max Metal has a lot in common with the company’s 4Max Pro 3D printer, which came and went in 2019 without making many ripples.
The 4Max Metal comes at an interesting juncture in desktop 3D printing, with BASF-backed Forward AM and its Ultrafuse 316L stainless steel filament on the market for some months already, opening the door to real metal parts on consumer 3D printers.
We know from experience that using such materials is a demanding process that requires far more attention to detail and design than ordinary desktop printing typically demands – an area Anycubic is familiar with through its large number of popular desktop machines.
Besides its innate compatibility with Anycubic’s 316L steel filament, there are a few small touches that distinguish it from Anycubic past printers.
Build Volume
The Anycubic 4Max Metal has a 270 x 210 x 200 mm build volume, 5 mm shorter in the Y and Z axes than its non-metal-minded predecessor. Judging from our experience with similar filaments designed ostensibly for desktop machines, the maximum size of a print that can survive the sintering process is pretty small.
As such, that full 270 x 210 build area could find a use for small-batch printing, although we’re not sure we’d be willing to risk a full plate of expensive metal prints if there’s a chance one could come loose – this material likes to warp – and ruin them all.
Temperatures
In the documentation we’ve seen thus far, the 4Max Metal has a maximum hotend temperature of 260°C. The heated bed can reach up to 100°C.
Enclosure
By nature of its fully enclosed design, the 4Max Metal should be able to keep the print chamber toasty through ambient heat from the bed – the ideal kind of environment to print tricky filaments, not least of which, high metal content 316L stainless steel.
Print Bed
The 4Max Metal comes with two boards for use as print beds. These are held in place with bulldog clips, meaning quick replacements of the bed should be possible.
In all honesty, we haven’t seen this kind of print bed before now so could not say precisely what the material is (Anycubic doesn’t specify). We assume it is included for how well the metal filament adheres to it.
Tough
To deal with the demands of abrasive filaments, which 316L stainless steel most definitely is when passing through an extruder, Anycubic has the 4Max Metal outfitted with a 0.5 mm steel nozzle.
Similarly, the extruder feed mechanism itself is a point of wear and tear with abrasive filaments such as 316L stainless steel. Ideally, these parts pinching and feeding the filament are abrasion-resistant, too. Without tearing our unit apart (which we’re unwilling to do until we’ve gone hands-on), we couldn’t say for sure if Anycubic addresses this with the 4Max Metal.
Other stuff
There is a brass cleaning brush fixed to the print bed platform. You must add some Gcode to the printer’s start code (manually, detailed in the user guide) before the nozzle will shoot back and forth across the brush, ensuring a clean start to a print.
Power out recovery that allows you to resume printing after a power failure, and an air filtration unit inside the chamber of the printer round out the other notable inclusions of the 4Max Metal.
A lack of auto-bed leveling could be seen as a notable omission.
Filament
No metal 3D printer would be complete without the metal material to feed through it. For Anycubic’s 4Max Metal, the company is releasing a 316L stainless steel filament that it has developed in collaboration with metal 3D printing materials and solution company, Uprise3D.
Available in 1.75 mm diameter, the filament boasts a shrinkage of between 17 and 25 percent post-sinter. The (again, detail-light) documentation we’ve seen indicates ROHS and Reach certification.
Designed to be desktop-friendly in the sense that you can print metal without any of the hazards of metal powder handling and sintering, the filament appears to be as printable as you might find with any other day-to-day 3D printing filament.
The user manual that ships on the SD card provided with the printer gives detailed sintering instructions for transitioning the printed parts from green to brown, and then sintered states, alongside the open invitation to contact Anycubic if more help is needed. From all we’ve seen, it’s a reasonable assumption that you will need to find access to a sintering service or furnace independently.
Before printing anything, factors such as shrinkage need to be taken into account. Prints must be oversized appropriately in all dimensions, and even then, some features will undergo sintering better than others.
Considering how accessible Anycubic’s 3D printers typically are, it’s no great leap to imagine that users of the company’s (and others’) cheaper desktop printers will be interested in the 4Max Metal. As such, detailed design documentation will be a must for users to have any chance of success with the 4Max Metal. Anycubic has confirmed to us that such guidelines will come, but we don’t know in what shape or form.
Release Date & Availability
We have it from Anycubic that the 4Max Metal is due for release around September. No specifics, but a rough indication of when we’ll see and hear more of the printer.
Handily, a beta unit landed on our doorstep in the middle of writing this piece, and it already seems pretty close to the finished article so the machine must be almost, if not already, good to go.
Price
Again, no official word on the price of the 4Max Metal, but Anycubic has claimed that it will be very affordable. A closer look at one of the product documents we have reveals a cost comparison between unspecified FFF technology at less than $1,415, with materials costs at approximately $141 per kilogram, against SLS in the hundreds of thousands.
No direct claim to a price, but this gives us a ballpark figure to work with.
It would be a little disingenuous to claim the 4Max Metal will be one of the cheapest metal 3D printing solutions available, because the specialty of this whole setup is the filament. Any printer with a metal hotend, abrasion-resistant nozzle, extruder gear, and idler, plus heated bed, should be able to handle stainless steel filament.
Not to say that the 4Max Metal isn’t a compelling proposition. It will be almost unique as a near ready-to-run desktop metal 3D printer. But if it does retail for some $1,415, that depresses our opinion a little bit considering the 4Max Pro, if you can find one, goes for ~$500. We’d wager there aren’t some $1,000 worth of upgrades on the 4Max Metal.
Reviews
With the printer months out from release, there are, unsurprisingly, no hands-on impressions to comment on as yet. This is a brand-new thing for Anycubic (in intent, at least, even if the printer itself is all too familiar).
As stated, a pre-production sample plopped onto our doorstep mid-writing this piece, so we’ll be taking a closer look in due course.
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